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OS X: Ok, so why is it that Mac OS X's Zoom button doesn't enlarge windows so that they fill the screen?

Apple's philosophy is that a maximized environment is inherintly inefficent since it makes dragging content from one window to another extremely cumbersome (read the section on Drag and Drop). Many types of documents are vertically oriented (like a printed page) yet monitors are wider than they are tall. So—for instance— it doesn't make sense for a word processing document to fill the width of the screen.

The Zoom button toggles its window between 2 states, the standard state and the user state. The standard state is determined by the manufacturer of the program being used. Apple's User Interface Guidelines provides this sensible direction to programmers for deciding the standard state of a window."

I just figured this out right now and knew where to come to get some help. I experienced this in a Mac Store when trying to maximize a window. How can you change it so it maximizes like on Windows XP? If i bought a mac, i would find this quite irritating.

Just change the window size once manually for each program when you buy the Mac and you'll never have to do it again for those programs. It's annoying, yes, and I know no way around it. But it doesn't annoy me anymore because I resized all the windows when I got my Mac and now they don't give me any more problems.

If anybody knows a way to make it so that the zoom button maximizes, that would be great...